Dogged by protesters, but apparently safe from damage in the polls, Friedrich Merz is putting a failed immigration gambit behind him.
He was just off the autobahn, beaming at a rush-hour crowd, and Friedrich Merz’s mind had steered to speedometers.
“If you’ve recently bought a new car, have you noticed what kind of automatic systems it’s equipped with now?” the man in the driver’s seat to be Germany’s next chancellor asked on Friday afternoon. “If you drive two kilometers per hour too fast, the thing starts beeping.”
Those beeps are the product of a European Union regulation. For Mr. Merz, they were a timely and tidy example of the government intrusions that he blames for stymying the German economy and frustrating its citizens.
They were also a handy segue into the issues Mr. Merz hopes to lounge in, like a nice leather captain’s chair, over the final stretch before Germany’s parliamentary elections on Feb. 23.
Mr. Merz and his party, the conservative Christian Democrats, endured two nervous weeks after he took a political gamble and broke a decades-old taboo by voting with rivals on the far right in a failed bid to toughen migration laws.
Outcry followed. Rival candidates sensed an opening. But polls taken since the hubbub indicate that Mr. Merz has emerged relatively unscathed. Even if he is now seen as a more polarizing figure, the former businessman and longtime conservative stalwart seems once again to be cruising toward the chancellorship.